I Have A Dream - 50 Years Later

Today we're going to be subjected to a tsunami of stories and commentary concerning the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. Thomas Sowell beat them to the punch yesterday by offering what I consider to be a very telling perspective.

At the core of Dr. King’s speech was his dream of a world in which people would not be judged by the color of their skin, but by “the content of their character.”

Yet many — if not most — of those who celebrate the “I have a dream” speech today promote the directly opposite approach of group preferences, especially those based on skin color.

Sowell goes on to point out that the improvements in civil rights arising from that speech and associated movement were necessary. He also states that equality under the law is just the beginning. Other factors are necessary to achieve true equality, and the government cannot supply those.

Education and job skills are crucial, and the government cannot give you these things. All it can do is make them available.

Race hustlers who blame all lags on the racism of others are among the obstacles to taking the fullest advantage of education and other opportunities.

Evidence to back up that claim may be found in several venues.

A growing body of empirical evidence is undermining the claim that racial preferences in college benefit their recipients. Students who are admitted to schools for which they are inadequately prepared in fact learn less than they would in a student body that matches their own academic level.

Duke admits black students with SAT scores on average over one standard deviation below those of whites and Asians (blacks’ combined math and verbal SATs are 1275; whites’ are 1416, and Asians’, 1457). Not surprisingly, blacks’ grades in their first semester are significantly lower than those of other ethnic groups...

That gap shrinks considerably by the students' senior year. One might think, therefore, that the minority students are catching up with their white and Asian peers. However, a closer look at the facts indicates otherwise.

Blacks improve their GPAs because they switch disproportionately out of more demanding science and economics majors into the humanities and soft social sciences, which grade much more liberally and require less work ... more than half of those would-be black science majors switched track in the course of their studies, while less than 8 percent of white males did, so that by senior year, only 35 percent of black males graduated with a science or economics degree, while more than 63 percent of white males did.

Attrition from a hard science major was wholly accounted for in the paper’s statistical models by a freshman’s level of academic qualifications; race was irrelevant.

The reaction to this study was, as you might expect, quick, vicious, and misguided. Critics accused the authors of lacking "a genuine concern for proactively furthering the well-being of the black community.” That's where the critics totally miss the point. The black community's well-being is imperiled by the prevailing social, economic, and cultural attitude promulgated by its own 'leaders' who encourage an environment that fosters single parent families, disrespects women, encourages violence and drug use, tolerates under-performing schools, and in general dons the mantle of victimhood. (here and here.)

The Duke study is not an isolated case. An earlier study demonstrated that blacks admitted to law schools under racial preference practices "end up overwhelmingly in the lowest quarter of their class and have much greater difficulties passing the bar than students admitted on their merits". Another paper reinforces the Duke study across multiple universities.

But academic studies are dry exercises in statistical analysis. A recent case study published by the Los Angeles Times humanized the tragedy of failed affirmative-action programs and unrealistic expectations.

The University of California, Berkeley, admited Kashawn Campbell, a South Central Los Angeles high-school senior, in 2012. Admitted under a state policy that allows students in the top 10 per cent of their high school class to attend the university of their choice, Kashawn struggled from day one. His first semester results?

[Kashawn] barely passed an introductory science course. In College Writing 1A, his essays — pockmarked with misplaced words and odd phrases — were so weak that he would have to take the class again.

His writing often didn’t make sense. He struggled to comprehend the [assigned readings] and think critically about the text.

He ended up with a 1.7 GPA. His best grade? An A- in African American Studies. His struggles soon took a psychological toll.

He had never felt this kind of failure, nor felt this insecure. . . . Each poor grade [was] another stinging punch bringing him closer to flunking out. None of the adults in his life knew the depth of his pain: not his professors, his counselors, any of the teachers at his old high school.

It wasn't long before he found himself sitting for the first time in a campus psychologist's office. The counselor urged him to put his life in better perspective. Maybe he didn't have to be the straight-A kid he'd been in high school anymore. Maybe all that mattered was giving his best.

In other words, lower your standards. Lower your expectations. Settle for mediocrity.

That's the true tragedy of racial preference programs. They overlook the cause of outcome disparities - the socioeconomic factors that ill-prepare so many of our poor and minorities for later success in life - and instead try to treat the symptoms. The obvious lesson is that students admitted to academic environments for which they are not prepared struggle more and learn less than if they had been enrolled in schools where their peers share their level of academic preparation.

There's a subtler lesson here as well: the ones harmed the most by racial preferences are those for whom it was designed to help.

I don't think this is what Dr. King had in mind...

UPDATE: Ben Carson nails it.